The expectation that artists should engage more with the world outside generated important strategies and rich practices, (as well as a some wrongly applied social amelioration), but it also questioned whether making objects was novel enough, community-minded enough, or had any use value. In this moral quagmire qualities that are essential to society, like individuality and subjectivity were viewed with suspicion, as though they implied a leaning towards Nazism or at least 1980s self-seeking. It seemed that an interrogation of aesthetic languages rather than the political was trading in decoration rather than function. This was until Claire Bishop, with her refreshing diet of Ranciere reminded us that aesthetics had always been about the problem of the tangle between art and life, and that to attempt to simplify and separate was to miss the point.
There are countless theories of how we project our subjectivity into objects, not least the Marxian investment of subjectivity in objects and object status in people, by the peculiar affects of the commodity fetish. In the following I look at some of the models we have for understanding how objects and subjects relate. Often these theories use familiar objects as their source – jewellery, lipstick, holiday snaps, clothes, and it’s rare to find these models applied to art. The reasons for this are obvious, as artworks have different intention, context and a different relationship to intentionality. However, I remain fascinated by how these philosophical, anthropological and economic ideas might support thinking about art – but especially support making art, rather than receiving art.
Psychoanalytical theories of the lost object, Winnicott’s transitional object, and melancholy objects used to traverse the processes of grief all accord the object with being a straightforward receptacle of human content. This is also aptly figured by Baudelaire’s Philosophy of Toys, which describes the child who takes apart a toy in search for its soul or interiority. In all of these the object is assigned a use, to help us directly perform a psychological function. These fairly crude transfers of subject to object, and then back to subject are a standard machine for writing about art too, as seen in historic artists biographies where the subjectivity of the artist is directly transferred into the work. However, other authors have sought to escape from this literal passage from subject into object and back to object again, and propose that the important thing about object and subject is that they are formed together- as we form the world we form ourselves.
In his 2001 essay, American literature specialist Bill Brown speculates on whether it is possible or desirable to theorise how things work, as the whole point is their impact is beyond theorising or categorising. Brown though, then spends a while thinking about what the difference between an object and a thing might be. The object he describes is circumscribed by language- names that describe table, brown, wood, IKEA etc. In contrast he writes about the thing,
Could you clarify this matter of things by starting again and imagining them, first, as the amorphousness out of which objects are materialized by the (ap)perceiving subject, the effect of the mutual constitution on subject and object, a retroprojection?
Brown sees ‘the thing’ as akin to the Golem and he quotes Bruce Chatwin’s description of the Golem in the novel Utz.
a quantity of untouched mountain soil. This was to be kneaded with fresh spring water and from it, a human image formed. The maker was to recite over each of the image’s limbs the appropriate alphabetical combination. He then walked round it clockwise a number of times,. Whereupon the golem stood and lived, where he to reverse the direction, the creature would revert to clay.
Chatwin describes how the Golem is brought to life by language – a word inscribed into metal and put in the monster’s mouth. The Hebrew word used, ‘emeth’ brings the Golem to life, but then, with the ‘e’ removed, spells death and returns the Golem to its inert clay.
The Golem image and its binary of thing and object has a romance to it. It evokes the remote possibility that we could still encounter things that sit beyond the understanding we have of social context. It’s a romance that we also have of art – an unlikely hope that we can encounter something unseen. Brown goes further too and hopes that by accessing the moment when an object is a thing we might catch the moment when subject and object – us and the material world – are in the process of forming each other. This process affects all humans and all objects and is a process of ‘objectification’. When asked whether they might think of a ‘thing’ instead of an object, students brought in many rocks, photographs and eccentric key rings, but the most interesting conversation developed when they examined a McDonalds happy meal toy with the hope of discerning whether it was object or thing. I expected the students to think it was an object, but instead they thought the model had so many names – Kung Fu Panda, the ostrich, fast food restaurant, rain – that it became overburdened by its naming and ended up a ‘thing’.
Other more recent views on the relationship between object and subject include the work of Jane Bennett, who contests the tradition of there being only one theory of materiality. Bennett instead explores a range of contentious viewpoints and suggests that there are always shifting sands between how the object and the subject are composed. She writes that there can be more material humans, and (as Bruno Latour states) objects with greater agency. She describes how some things,
upset conventional distinctions between material and life, inorganic and organic, passive object and active subject. These examples dramatize the ability of materiality to move across those lines.
In the introduction to the book ‘Materiality’ by Daniel Miller, Miller explores how people always use material form to communicate ideas of immateriality, and gives examples including Buddhist statues, shamanism and the speculative share market. He also questions whether we invest our subjectivity into objects and, like Brown, describes how the two are mutually constitutive. Miller refers to Alfred Gell and his notion that the things we make become the ‘distributed mind’ of the maker. However he also notes that they have the potential to appear, and become alien to us.
In a review of a book, ‘Evocative Objects’ by Sherry Turkle, Graham Harman (usually-described as a ‘Speculative Realist’) charts the progress of Turkle trying to find a new theory of the ‘evocative’ object. They name (unusually) the autonomous nature of the artwork as a key. Other qualities include ‘richness’ and ‘depth’. We can take Miller one stage forward, then, and into consideration of the art object. He refers to Kant who thought an artwork is defined by its density, an opacity we can’t simply gaze through without seeing. Kant’s thoughts on the legibility of the subjective seem particularly contemporary here, as alongside Harman and Bennett, Kant doesn’t see objects as things to unpick. Kant sees objects without a narrative translation, communicating with, through and in their material reality.
Finally, one of the newer theories of materiality centres around the notion of deep time embedded in the material world, and how this positions us beyond object and subject. This new position enables us to understand the production of all material form, human and non-human, as process. Iain Hamilton Grant (another ‘Speculative Realist’) talks about the way geology opens up an abyss where every object, word and experience is a causal product of a time even before land. He describes how the geological past issues the present of our material world – as minerals form televisions and iPhones etc. Hamilton Grant writes that the material present issues the future: every new object is the retro determination of the planet. By thinking like this the objects we produce are inculcated in natural history rather than social history only. Hamilton Grant also talks about how objects are always incomplete processes (as are natural processes) and by seeing this understanding as key we can understand again how we are involved in processes of production that shape human life. For Grant this transcends the notion that process is always about producing subject and object.
Claire Bishop (2004) Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics. October, Vol. 110 (Autumn,), pp. 51-79.
Sigmund Freud (1991) On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and other works. Penguin Freud Library. Penguin, London.
Donald Winnicott (1991) Playing and Reality. Routledge, London.
Margaret Gibson (2004) Melancholy Objects. Mortality, Vol.9, No.4.
Charles-Pierre Baudelaire (2010) A Philosophy of Toys in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Penguin Classics, London.
Bill Brown (2001) Thing Theory. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No. 1, Things. (Autumn), pp. P.1-22.
http://www.faculty.virginia.edu/theorygroup/docs/brown.thing-theory.2001.pdf
Jane Bennett (2004) The Force of Things: Steps towards an Ecology of Matter. Political Theory, June.
Daniel Miller (2010) Materiality. Duke University Press, New York.
Graham Harman (2008). Zeroing in on Evocative Objects. Human Studies 31:443–457
Iain Hamilton Grant (2011) paper given at Royal Academy conference, Royal Geological Society, July 1st.
